o himself. It was the same tuneless chant that had taken
possession of him by Harvington-on-Avon; but more instant now and more
confident, breaking from him now upon the open sea, with moon and stars
above him. Tilda did not hear it, for she slept. He himself was hardly
conscious of it. His thoughts were on the Island, on the miracle that
was going to happen. He did not know that it had already begun to
happen; that the tide was already slackening; nor, had he marked it,
would he have understood. For almost an hour he sang on, and so slipped
down in the stern-sheets and slept.

By and by, while he slept, the tide reached its ebb and came stealing
back, drawing with it a breeze from the south-west.

He awoke to a sound which at first he mistook for the cawing of rooks--
there had been many rooks in the trees beyond the wall of Holy
Innocents, between it and the Brewery. But, gazing aloft, he saw that
these were sea-gulls, wheeling and mewing and making a mighty pother.
And then--O wonder!--as he rubbed his eyes he looked up at a tall
cliff, a wall of rock rising sheer, and a good hundred feet from its
base where the white water was breaking. The boat had drifted almost
within the back-draught, and it was to warn him that the gulls were
calling.

"The Island! The Island!"

He caught up his oar and called to Tilda. She struggled up sleepily,
and gasped at the sight.

"You must take an oar and help!" he called. "There must be a landing
near, if we work her round the point--"

And, sure enough, around the point they opened a small cove, running
inwards to a narrow beach of shingle. A grassy gully wound up from the
head of the cove, broadening as it trended to the left, away from the
tall rocks of the headland; and at the sight of this 'Dolph began
barking furiously, scaring fresh swarms of sea-birds from their
roosting-ledges.

They were in quiet water here, and in less than two minutes--the boy
steering--the boat's stem grated softly on the shingle and took ground.
'Dolph sprang ashore at once, but the children followed with some
difficulty, for they were cold and stiff, and infinitely weary yet.
It seemed to them that they had reached a new world: for a strange light
filled the sky and lay over the sea; a light like the sheen upon grey
satin, curiously compounded of moonlight and dawn; a light in which the
grass shone a vivid green, but all else was dim and ghostly.

Scarcely knowing what they did, the